Let’s face it – Hell week isn’t fun. 3 or 4 midterms in one week is really difficult and stressful. But having a week with no classes allows us to pause halfway during the term and try to understand everything we have learned so far. Without hell week midterms just become another added stress on top of everything else we have got going on and we’re so busy trying to survive, actually learning anything during the week becomes impossible.
Did you know there’s an accepted and acknowledged way to understand course concepts and do well in school? It’s through reviewing lectures notes regularly – like, weekly. Not just twice a term for midterms and finals. I know we all do this. But you know what makes this impossible? Learning new material while writing midterms.
If I have to write exams – then hell week is the most efficient way to do it. Writing exams is hard. Writing exams while simultaneously attending classes, doing labs and trying to finish assignments? That’s needlessly overburdening students for no reason.
Every term when I am studying for finals and my days are filled with memorizing equations, relearning integration once again and seriously questioning all my life decisions, any minute I expect a magical fairy to appear and tell me that none of this is actually real. For someone to tell me that the result of all my hard work over the past four months won’t actually be determined by the amount of answers I can manage to come up with in a two-hour time slot. But alas, no fairy has yet to appear and I am forced to walk to write finals on a term by term basis.
My point is – exams are bad. Not just because they’re hard and studying isn’t fun but because memorizing an entire course and regurgitating it for two hours should not be an acceptable form of testing our understanding.
Exams are also extremely stressful and as mental health of students increasingly becomes a concern on Canadian campuses, the validity of exams as a form of pedagogy becomes even more doubtful.
This entire debate of hell week or no hell week rests on the assumption that writing exams is a given. But I’d like to take this opportunity to challenge that assumption. Imagine an alternative form of pedagogy: one where the fate of an entire semester isn’t dependent on a two hour block of time, and where instead of writing exams students are taught forms of experiential learning.
I am not saying that our education system is going to magically change tomorrow. But I think we’re capable of changing it more than we’d like to believe. From changing individual courses through course reviews and by talking to professors to going through EngSoc’s VP Education for larger changes to educational practices I think we need to start asking for the changes we want to see in our education system.
At this point midterms are mostly over and I hope most of us survived – whether they came in the form of hell week or not. But if your midterms went not so great, instead of simply trying to change the way midterms are held let’s look at the bigger picture and re-imagine our entire educational experience.
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